Vendor
	Mohrbooks Literary Agency Sebastian Ritscher
Original language
English
Categories
Memoirs

GIVING UP THE GHOST

Hilary Mantel

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most improbable of accomplishments, including "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay," were within her grasp. Once married, however, she acquired a persistent pain that led to destructive drugs and patronizing psychiatry, ending in an ineffective but irrevocable surgery. There would be no children; in herself she found instead one novel, and then another.

Available products
Book Published 2003-05-01 by Fourth Estate
Book Published 2003-05-01 by Fourth Estate

Comments

With a harsh wit reminiscent of Mary McCarthy, prizewinning novelist Mantel writes about growing up Catholic in England, about her family secrets, school, work, and marriage, and about the chronic, excruciatingly painful illness that hit her at the age of 27. Without nostalgia, she remembers her childhood in a village community: "Every person oversaw the affairs of the next; and sniggered about them." Her self-mockery is just as entertaining, and she's honest about how hard it is to remember: "you can't make sense of childhood, only report it as it felt." She's enraged against the medical establishment that for years treated her physical symptoms as female neurosis caused by overambition. Yet with the fury and farce, she also writes with lyrical simplicity about loss. She remembers missing her dad after the family breakup: "He was never mentioned after we parted: except by me, to me. We never met again." Women's book groups will want this, and so will writers trying to tell their stories.

The matter is bitter, but Mantel's angular wit is as unquenchable as her anger; the reading experience is reliably exhilarating because of the sheer excellence of the writing.

Dazzlingly written...a highly unorthodox account of what is essentially unsayable about the inward uncharted life.

Fans of Mantel's critically acclaimed novels may enjoy the memoir as insight into her world.

Blazing insights [and] poetic discourses that rattle the soul...Mantel doesn't simply hit close to home, she knocks at our closets and opens our doors.